'Ascent,' a mixed-media painting by John Felsing. Used with permission
EDITOR'S NOTE: Are you feeling despair? Mountain Journal friend Terry Tempest Williams is featured in The New York Times reading her "obituary for the land" titled A Burning Testament. Her husband, the Western nature writer Brooke Williams, shared the piece in its entirety on social media. Given recent events, it could not be more poignant and we encourage you to read it now.
A Burning Testament
By Terry Tempest Williams
Mid September 2020
With these ashes in hand that have fallen from near and far on the drought-cracked desert of Utah, I raise my fist to a smoke-choked sky to honor the holy creatures, human and wild, who have lost their lives and homes to the galloping flames like rider-less horses burning through the West.
We are witness to ghostly horizons lit with the scalding colors of, red, orange, purple, black, the blowout of close to five million acres of land being ravaged by fires with such velocity it is melting our capacity to feel the full magnitude of what is happening – We are not okay.
We are anxious. We are scared. There is no place to run. There is no place to hide. There is only our love and grief to hold us in the terror of all we are seeing, sensing, denying. We can’t touch the source of our despair because we can’t touch each other. And so we retreat inside when everything outside is screaming. We are sitting in rooms watching screens alone, waiting, as if this is a pause instead of a place, the place where we find ourselves now.
The facts do not tell the story of how our hearts are breaking, nor do the photographs of blackened forests or lone chimneys standing as monuments to homes once inhabited, or does the news speak to the terror of fleeing fires lapping at our heels that we can never outrun only pray for a change in the wind.
No one is reporting the smells of burnt fur or feathers or leaves and sap or the cold hard truth of those who find the missing frozen in their last gestures of escape beneath a blanket of ashes, ashes -- not even the stories reported by biologists in New Mexico who are picking up the bodies of hundreds of thousands of migrating birds in mixed flocks of warblers, flycatchers, sparrows, and finches found dead on the ground in Great White Sands with no explanation but the conjecture they died from exhaustion, forced to flee the forests before their bodies were fattened ready to make the long journeys south.
Our valley is a steady stream of birds who stop and drink from our well, our bird baths and tubs we have waiting for them. And there are nine known bears in our valley who have come down from the mountains looking for food and water. They wander through our community in shrouds of smoke they have been unable to shake off from last month’s epic fires in Colorado, a few wing beats away as the raven flies.
Unable at times to distinguish day from night, we have only have a blood red sun and an orange-faced moon exchanging places in the sky to orient us as temperatures rise, fires rage, and before our eyes, in a flash, a neighboring national forest becomes the charred citadel of a vibrant world – gone. We are saying farewell to what we love and why we stay. How can we stay? The landscape of the American West is burning and we are burning, too.
We have been living a myth. We have constructed a dream. We have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things; with plants and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes and grizzly bears, remaining subservient to our whims, desires, and needs. This is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations as a grave, a grave moral sin committed and buried in the name of ignorance and arrogance.
We have been living a myth. We have constructed a dream. We have cajoled and seduced ourselves into believing we are the center of all things; with plants and other sentient beings from ants to lizards to coyotes and grizzly bears, remaining subservient to our whims, desires, and needs. This is a lethal lie that will be seen by future generations as a grave, a grave moral sin committed and buried in the name of ignorance and arrogance.
It is true we have mismanaged our forests and suppressed fire for decades. We have ignored and failed to listen to the wisdom of Indigenous People who have understood and lived with fire for generations. We have built our homes within the woods when we should have respected the necessary breathing spaces between the domestic and the wild. We have overbuilt and overridden the carrying capacity of arid landscapes and underestimated the limits of water in times of drought. We have sacrificed the integrity of fragile and iconic landscapes for the development of oil and gas to fuel “the American way of life.”
This is freedom unmasked. We have a right to live as we wish. Until we can’t. Our reckless history of human habitation in the American West is on a collision course with the climate crisis. Climate Change is not a hoax. It is real and it is a fire-breathing dragon blowing fire at our doors.
We cannot breathe. This is our mantra in America now. We cannot breathe because of the smoke. We cannot breathe because of a virus that has entered our homes. We cannot breathe because of police brutality and too many black bodies dead on the streets. We cannot breathe because we are holding our breath for the people and places we love.
I was asked to write an obituary for the land – but I realize I am writing an obituary for us, for the life we have lost and can never return to – and within this burning of western lands, our innocence and denial is in flames. The obituary will be short. The time came and these humans died from the old ways of being. Good riddance. It was time. Their cause of death was the terminal disease of solipsism whereby humans put themselves at the center of the universe. It was only about them. And in so doing we have been dead to the world that is alive.
To the power of these burning, illuminated western lands who have shaped our character, inspired our souls, and restored our belief in what is beautiful and enduring—I will never write your obituary— because even as you burn, you are throwing down seeds that will sprout and flower, trees will grow, and forests will rise again as living testaments to how one survives change.
It is time to grieve and mourn the dead and believe in the power of renewal. If we do not embrace our grief, our sadness will come out sideways in unexpected forms of depression and violence. We must dare to find a proper ceremony to collectively honor the dead from the coronavirus as we approach 200,000 citizens lost. We must honor the lives engulfed in these western fires and the lives we will continue to lose from the climate crisis at hand —Only then can we begin the work of restoration, respecting the generations to come as we clear a path toward cooling a warming planet.
This will be our joy.
Let this be a humble tribute, an exaltation, an homage, and an open-hearted eulogy to all we are losing to fire to floods to hurricanes and tornadoes and the invisible virus that has called us all home and brought us to our knees -- We are not the only species that lives and loves and breathes on this miraculous planet called Earth—May we remember this—and raise a fist full of ash to all the lives lost that it holds.
Grief is love. How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live. We can cry. Our tears will fall like rain in the desert and wash off our skins of ash so our pores can breathe, so our bodies can breathe back the lives that we have taken for granted.
I will mark my heart with an “X” made of ash that says, the power to restore life resides here. The future of our species will be decided here. Not by facts but by love and loss.
Hand on my heart, I pledge of allegiance to the only home I will ever know.
ABOUT THE PAINTING AT TOP: Ascent, an original mixed-media painting by John Felsing, Is perfectly matched with Williams' essay. In these uncertain times, Felsing too says we must move out of our docile comfort zone and rally.
He writes of the inspiration for this work: "Moonrise over the pond has given life to so many paintings. Knowing the moon was coming, my anticipation of its arrival left me far from any comfort zone. If I’ve learned anything about the making of art in the decades of attempting to do so, it is that I have never liked feeling comfortable. A comfort zone can be a beautiful place, but nothing ever grows there. It is the edges which must be courted, and the edge is not kept - it visits when it wants to. So you have to be ready when it arrives, much like waiting for the moon. Of course you never are really ready, and therein lies the beauty; that is what brings you to the edge.
There is something je ne sais quoi about first seeing the full moon as it appears out of the murk found along the horizon. Immense and transparent, its life is so very short in this state. Soon it will rise, like a trout to the surface, and be suspended above the earth like some work of art. And, as we know, life is surely not a work of art—so the painting becomes yet another portrait of life and all of its imperfections. In the countless years searching for paintings of the moon, it brought me to the understanding that I was never less alone than when by myself—and that is where art is made, if made at all. You must ever be the stargazer.
About Terry Tempest Williams
Terry Tempest Williams is an American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist. Williams' writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of Utah and its Mormon culture. She is considered one of the most influential nature writers of her generation. Williams has a special affinity for the wild Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Currently a writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School (though disrupted by Covid-19), she is author of the recent critically-acclaimed collection Erosion: Essays of Undoing and is known for her award-winning book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.
